Labor Sec. Marty Walsh Defends Build Back Better

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, we continue our conversation on jobs and the impact of the pandemic with U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. Here he is speaking with Walter Isaacson about what it will take for America’s job market to bounce back.

(BEGIN CLIP)

WATLER ISAACSON: Thank you Bianna, and Secretary Marty Walsh, thank you for being with us.

MARTY WALSH, U.S. LABOR SECRETARY: Thank you. It’s great to be here. I’m excited about this.

ISAACSON: We’re in the midst of which sometimes being called the Great Resignation. 4.4 million people in September drop out of the labor market. What’s causing that.

WALSH: Oh, it’s clearly the pandemic. I mean, when you think about what we’ve been through as a country, what we’ve been through as a world from, from March of 2020, for the most part here in the United States of America, we’ve been living in trying to adjust to times living in a pandemic. And I think a lot of people felt that by now it would be beyond this point. You know, America, at least for a hundred years, never dealt with a pandemic, you know, as, as a kid growing up in Boston and, and being a state rep and a mayor, you know, I never ever in my wildest imagination thought I’d be shutting everything down and then trying to live through this. And now as my role as secretary labor, I think the underlying cause for a lot of things, I think the unease in the public the job market the, the economy, this everything is, is, is, is pandemic.

ISAACSON: Yeah. But there seems to be something more basic coming out of this pandemic that there’s a Gulf between what employers are willing to pay and what employees now want to do with their lives. I mean, how are you going to bridge that gulf?

WALSH: Well, I was talking to, I was talking to a businessman the other night in Boston and what they said to me, it was interesting that even after the last pandemic in generally pandemics around the world, there’s always an increase in wages. And there’s always a concern about participation in the workforce. Not now, maybe it’s not spoken that way in the past, but there’s definitely been a correlation there. And I think that we’re experiencing some of that. And I think that when you, when, when you say the great resignation, what I really think about there is I don’t always think about people who might’ve been working in restaurants. I think about people that are a year or two years away from retirement. And they’ve been, they’ve been working from home remotely saying to themselves that, you know, I’m not going to go back in whether it’s pandemic related or, or they’ve been used to a certain lifestyle. I think that that’s one of the areas that, that we’ve lost a lot of people to retirement that, that quite honestly, a two and three has left.

ISAACSON: Do you think that some of the benefits, the COVID benefits, the extended unemployment that sort of laid the mindset for this?

WALSH: I think honestly, it’s been people having time to think about where they are in their life, where they’re in their career and thinking, listen, I was working in a job that was, that, that paid me, you know, subpar wages, or I was doing something that wasn’t fulfilling and people were saying, wait a second. Now I have an opportunity to do something different. I think that’s part of it. We also have, you know, when you think about the economy and where we are with workers you know, we lost 675,745,000 many people to COVID-19. There’s a good portion of those folks that died that were in the workforce. We have people with mental health issues and not necessarily diagnosed, but concerns about, about the pandemic. We have people afraid to go back to work because of the pandemic. Now we’re seeing rises the numbers. Again, you have people, quite honestly, that’s not talked about much, but we’ve lost a hundred thousand people in this country through, through opioids. And a lot of those folks, you multiply that number, say by five or six or 10 people that’s a lot of people that quite honestly, aren’t ready to come into the workforce.

ISAACSON: You just talked about the opioid crisis, a hundred thousand deaths, I think in a year, you yourself went through a battle with alcoholism. Tell me about that and tell me what the role of the workplace, what that did to you and understanding how we’re split, how you would deal with this as a labor secretary.

WALSH: Well, you know, you think about going through alcoholism or, or substance use disorder. You know, it’s a disease number one, and if you’re not willing to, if you’re not ready or willing to go for help, then it’s going to impact you as a human being. It’s going to impact your family. It’s going to impact your ability to be productive worker at work. When I went into treatment, I went to work every day. I was a functioning alcoholic, if you could want to decide that, you know, definition of it. But when I, when I got into recovery, my whole outlook on life changed my whole outlook on work changed, and I became a better employee. You know, eventually I got a chance to run for office and I was you know, I think recovery helped me to be a good state representative and a good mayor. And, and now as labor secretary, but I’ll tell you, you know, during the beginning of the pandemic when I was, as the mayor of Boston, we would do a press conference every day. And at the end of that press conference, I would always make a note to talk to people indirectly about people that are struggling with, with whether it’s alcohol opioids or mental health to say, you need to go get help because you know, those, those illnesses are diseases of isolation. And here we have a pandemic where we’re telling people basically to isolate, you know, stay six feet away from each other, you know, no big gatherings. And it was a perfect scenario. And I think that, that that’s had a big impact as well in us moving forward. So, you know, I, I just think that there’s a big piece of it, but what recovery has done for me as well during the pandemic, I have the ability to kind of work on myself and, and still stay connected to the recovery community on a nightly basis if I chose to resume. And I had that outlet to talk to many people in America, don’t have an outlet to talk to about their problems that they have.

ISAACSON: You gave very good explanations of why people aren’t in the workforce or have dropped out of the workforce, resigned, whether they be people near the end of their careers, people in different industries, but isn’t that a really bad thing. Don’t we need these people back into the workforce. And how do you think the administration can solve that?

WALSH: Well, I, I think that, you know, certainly I would love to be able to announce on my job days or the first Friday of the month, these record numbers. And when you, when you look at the numbers, they really are record numbers from, from when president Biden took over in January til today, 5.6 million people have returned to the workforce, but we still have millions of jobs opening in our country. I think there’s a couple of pieces that, that we have to work on first was the rescue plan that the president passed when he first got elected. And a lot of, a lot of the money went into childcare, and there was a big, big void there with childcare. A lot of these facilities either shut down or, or were closed. A lot of parents, some parents haven’t come back, some facilities haven’t opened Last week, Monday that last week, I should say, the president signed the bill, the infrastructure bill, which was a big investment into opportunity for employees. I think that some of the biggest part is obviously job creation in the physical construction, but also we can’t take for granted the broadband connectivity, the president put in there and really connecting rural America to the broad bands. And I think that that’s going to help more people as well, reenter the job force or into the job for us, and even help them change careers. The build back better reconciliation package is being debated right now. There’s tens of billions of dollars in there for job training pre-apprentice programs and apprenticeships. And I think that we have to, in some cases, reimagine how we do job training and part of that is by creating more apprenticeships.

ISAACSON: The build better plan being debated this week has a lot of social spending in it, part of the reconciliation package. Why would that not be inflationary when we’re in a time of worker shortages, supply chain shortages people say this could really add to the horrible inflation we’re experiencing.

WALSH: The way I look at it, I don’t look at it as social spending. I look at a social investment. And when you think about what, what we’re doing for first, I’ll just go through a couple of quick things. Number one childcare families earning under $300,000 a year, we pay no more than 70% of their salaries to childcare that would allow families that more money to be able to spend in the economy, extending the child tax credit one more year. That allows families that are poor, the opportunity to have more dollars in their pocket, to be able to spend more money on their families and be able to, to be able to live a good life, not struggling from, from, from day to day, you have opportunities in that bill as well for job training and workforce development money that we can, we can here in the United States, in the department of labor, I should say, think about, we have a worker shortage. And, and, and we, we really have a job quality shortage. We have people going into different jobs. So we’re able to look and train folks into those different areas to move forward. We also have universal prekindergarten. We have a system and educational system in America. It depends on what zip code you live in. Whether you have a good education, or you might not get a good education, but if you have a something that’s a game changer that you have, where whatever zip code you live in the United States of America, and you can get into prekindergarten at the age of three years old and four years old, then the, the outcomes, the studies show that you up your productivity and your opportunity for graduating high school and college, or an a program go off the chart. So, you know, we, we’ve never seen this type of investment in American people. And it really, I think, honestly, I’m speaking of Marty Walsh, the investments here will be, game-changing, it won’t add to inflation. If anything, it will help bring inflation down. It will give people more opportunities in their pocket to be able to purchase more. And, and the purchasing power, buying more will bring the cost down.

ISAACSON: One of the objections that Senator Manchin and a couple of others now have with the plan and reconciliation is things that probably near and dear to your heart or somebody who came up in a labor union, which is say for a variety of things, including the car T credits for electric vehicles, they have to be made by union workers. What’s the justification for that?

WALSH: Well, the, the beauty of that is that we keep jobs, the United States of America, and we keep manufacturing in areas that yesterday I was at the GM facility in, in in Michigan where they’re making electric vehicles and making electric commerce, they’re making electric Bolts and the opportunity for us to be able to hire more workers, to be able to keep workers there. And at the same in the next breath, the president said, some of these companies also have to pay more in taxes, the big companies that, that this will help pay for the bill. This doesn’t add any, any money to the bottom line. It doesn’t add money to the debt. So there’s opportunities here to be able to keep jobs here, but also request that these companies pay more in taxes so that they can, we can continue to invest in America.

ISAACSON: But they should be union jobs. You think?

WALSH: Well, I mean, I think, I guess that’s a tough one. I mean, I think that you know, certainly I’m going to advocate for union jobs all across the road as best I can, but there’s other provisions in there as well by American. And it doesn’t specify in the, by American that it’s all union products is about manufacturing and trying to bring more manufacturing to United States of America. So there’s other aspects of the bill to, and other aspects of the Biden, Harrison administration, not that doesn’t talk about specifically about unions.

ISAACSON: The fifth circuit court of appeals just stopped OSHA from enforcing the vaccine mandates on businesses. And I think you’ve now suspended trying to have a OSHA do that, was that a mistake to try to do it through OSHA. And did you think of other ways that maybe it could have been done?

WALSH: No, it’s absolutely the right way to do it, and now we’re waiting for the, the court, the court of appeal will take it up to circuit court. I should say, we’ll take it up. And at the end of the day we have to do everything we can to get to the end of a, of a pandemic. This is one tool that can help us with that. We’re seeing a rising rates now in this country, I was looking, I was watching TV this morning and I saw, you know, a little bit of the Northeast, we’re seeing spikes and COVID-19, again this is the fifth or sixth time that we’re seeing these spikes. You know, if we don’t get to the other end, the pandemic at some point here in the future here and we don’t get it under control, then we’re going to continue to have problems with our workforce and with people’s mental health. And I think that what we did here at OSHA, what OSHA did was absolutely the right thing. It’s not a mandate. It was there, it was a test or a vaccine or testing. And quite honestly, I heard more positives from companies that might be a little afraid to say something right now, but more companies that thank you for doing that, because I want to get my workforce open again. And to be able to say to workers who were afraid to come back to work, that the people inside of this, whatever it is, business are either vaccinated or testing every day, every week, that that will make people feel comfortable and safe.

ISAACSON: But do you understand why some people might just feel that the government, the federal government shouldn’t tell them they have to get a vaccine in order to go to work?

WALSH: You know, the unfortunate thing about vaccines, I think in what we’re going through right now, and including masks and some places it’s become political. And it’s really unfortunate because I remember not that long ago you know, I’ll, I’ll go, I’ll take it back to may of 2020 in the city of Boston or everywhere else. We had our emergency rooms busting with people that were in that had the the COVID-19 infection and, and they were on ventilators. And at that point, lots of people saying we can’t wait for a vaccine to happen. And unfortunately it became political, and it’s not about politics about keeping people safe, healthy, and alive. You know, we’ve buried five over 5 million people in this world due to this pandemic. And, and those are family and people that won’t be at the table at the holidays this year, and they weren’t at the table, or the markets they have last year. We have to be creative on how do we do things to keep people safe. And I don’t think anybody any, any government, whether it’s state local or federal wants that wants to be talking about vaccines and masks, but unfortunately we have to do everything we can to make sure people are safe.

ISAACSON: One of the key components of build back better, and the reconciliation bill is childcare. Explain what you think this country should be doing to increase the amount of a high quality childcare, but also do it in a way where you’re not excluding religious organizations and others and giving them too many requirements and regulations.

WALSH: Well, first and foremost, I think when we think about childcare, we can’t afford not to have the organizations that are involved in childcare, involved in childcare in the future. So we need to keep all those doors open because we just don’t have enough seats for the kids in this country. Number one, number two when you think about childcare and right now, many families are paying 30, 40, 50% of the, one of, one of the one, if there’s only one family member, if there’s only a mother working of their salary to keep their kids, you know in childcare, while they work to, to be able to keep food on the table, this would, would, would allow the families to only have to pay up to 7% of their, of their salary to, to afford childcare, good quality childcare. Number one, number two, [inaudible] number four by now, actually, it’s also about, you know, we, the hardest hit one of the hardest hit groups in the pandemic women that will push out of the workforce.And we need to make sure women, because they’re 50% of the population we need to make sure women have back in the economy. If we’re talking about having a strong economy, we can’t have a strong economy which is guys or white men working in it. We need to make sure that that women are in the economy. We need to make sure that people of color in the economy, we need to make sure that people have opportunities for good paying jobs. And by having childcare, good, strong childcare will help be able to create pathways. One last example, I’ll give you a construction. One of the things that w w we’re not as great on in construction is having women in the trades. Now, there are women in the trades, but there’s not a large number of women in trades. The biggest single factor for women not being in the trades is the lack of childcare at seven o’clock in the morning. So we have an opportunity to kind of re-imagine childcare. There isn’t one person that’s going to watch a show that has a child is going to say, well, that’s a mistake. We need to invest in childcare, and we’ll probably 20th behind it. So we should start. Now.

ISAACSON: You’re one of the most traveled a cabinet secretary so far, it’s like you been to 27 states. One of those stops with the Kellogg strikers, what message were you trying to send?

WALSH: I was just trying to let people know that, that I’m there. I was encouraging both sides to go to the table and talk about it. You know, when there’s a strike and I’ve been part of strikes in the past, you know, I’ve helped as mayor negotiate strikes and settle strikes and, and, and a secretary labor. I want to be able to do the same thing. I like to get both sides, want to have a conversation. I’ll, you know, I can be impartial, even though people don’t say you can’t be impartial. No, I can be impartial. I can be very impartial. You just ask some of the businesses in Boston about my, me being impartial. And I think that, you know, anything we can do to support, you know, workers and support companies, that’s important. When you think of that strike alone, you have workers making an important produce for America, and you have a company that’s been a longstanding American company. And the best thing to do is try and get to a quick resolution is possible in that particular case, if we can.

ISAACSON: Will we ever get back to full employment and high participation in the workforce, or have things sort of fundamentally changed after the pandemic?

WALSH: I think we’re definitely going to get back to, to, to, to whatever, whatever the definition of full employment is in our country. Cause there’s always changing. I think one thing that’s curious right now that we’ve seen is I saw a stat the other day. I want to say 30% of new 30% new entrepreneurship in America. So we’ve never really seen anything like that before where people have said, wait, I’m going to try something new myself. And so that’s going to change. We’re still trying to figure out what, what’s the work place going to look like after the pandemic? Is it going to be more remote or more in person? And I think people, people are, people have to go back to work. They will go back to work. But I think, I think it’s going to look a little different, but we will get back to full employment, but I think it’ll look different. I think it could be good for us. I think at the end of the day, you know, we look back on this period of time. It could be great for the American worker not what happened, cause I don’t want to say a pandemic is great, but what, what came out of it could be great for the American worker and for American companies.

ISAACSON: Secretary Marty Walsh, thank you for being with us.

WALSH: Thanks for having me today. It was great.